Video Vault: Blind faith in moviemaking turns into tale of epic failure in 'Audience of One'

Friday

Aug 28, 2009 at 12:01 AMAug 28, 2009 at 7:18 AM

One of my favorite films is 1999’s “American Movie,” which tells the story of Mark Borchardt, a guy who’s been obsessed with film since before he can remember. “Audience of One,” a 2007 documentary now on DVD, tells a story that’s both similar and completely different.

Will Pfeifer

One of my favorite films is 1999’s “American Movie,” which tells the story of Mark Borchardt, a guy who’s been obsessed with film since before he can remember. He lives thousands of miles from Hollywood, but he dreams of making a low-budget black-and-white horror movie. And with the help of friends, money from his dying uncle and the imaginative use of Wisconsin locations, he accomplishes his goal.

“Audience of One,” a 2007 documentary now on DVD, tells a story that’s both similar and completely different. Would-be moviemaker Richard Gazowsky didn’t see a movie until he was 40, but that experience — along with what he claims was divine inspiration — prompted him to make his own film. And not just any film: a sci-fi retelling of the biblical story of Joseph complete with hundreds of extras, location shooting in Italy and a budget that jumps from $50 million to $100 million to a whopping $200 million.

Gazowsky’s project is so huge, so ambitious, so simply mad that’s there’s no way it could possibly succeed. And it doesn’t, of course. It fails in just about every way you can imagine. I’m not ruining any surprise here, because as soon as you hear Gazowsky say he wants this to literally be the greatest movie ever made, you know “Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph” is doomed. The only way it could succeed is if God himself stepped down into San Francisco and ran the camera.

That’s not to say that miracles don’t occur. It’s a miracle, for example, that Gazowsky is able to raise $250,000 from his church. It’s a miracle that he insists on using a very expensive movie camera but has no idea how to make it work. And it’s a miracle that, after Italian laborers leave because he’s too cheap, Gazowsky relies on his untrained volunteers to finish building the sets.

Faith is a hard concept to capture on film, but “Audience of One” manages to do it by taking the usual aspects of religion out of the equation and replacing them with filmmaking. There’s no reason for Gazowsky to think there’s any way he’ll get “Gravity” made, but he never doubts himself for a second. That, my fellow film fans, is true faith. Misplaced, dangerous, expensive faith, but faith nonetheless.

After watching Gazowsky struggle mightily to make “Audience of One,” you can click on a bonus feature and watch the two shots he managed to capture on film. Not scenes. Shots. Silent clips that run less than three minutes. It just proves that no matter how much faith you have, sometimes you have to actually know what you’re doing.

Will Pfeifer writes about new DVDs on Tuesdays and older ones on Fridays. Contact him at wpfeifer@rrstar.com or 815-987-1244. Read his blog at blogs.e-rockford.com/movie man/.